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Rent-seeking” is what economists call a special type of money-making: the sort made possible by political connections. This can range from outright graft to a lack of competition, poor regulation and the transfer of public assets to firms at bargain prices. Well-placed people have made their fortunes this way ever since rulers had enough power to issue profitable licences, permits and contracts to their cronies.

Capitalism based on rent-seeking is not just unfair, but also bad for long-term growth.

It identifies sectors which are particularly dependent on government—such as mining, oil and gas, banking and casinos—

principle

So the need for an agreement between the euro zone and the IMF is paramount. The IMF as a senior creditor can't accept losses of its own in the Greek program and it has to convince unhappy members from the emerging world that lent it money to continue financing Greece that the country's debt is sustainable. For this to happen, about 50 billion euros ($65 billion) must be forgiven from Greece's giant debt and the decision for such action including the political backlash is squarely in Europe's court.

It will mark the end of an era for Cyprus, which has in effect spent the past decade advertising itself as a place where wealthy individuals who want to avoid taxes and scrutiny can safely park their money, no questions asked.

To some extent this reflected the fact that capital controls have potential costs: they impose extra burdens of paperwork, they make business operations more difficult, and conventional economic analysis says that they should have a negative impact on growth (although this effect is hard to find in the numbers). But it also reflected the rise of free-market ideology,

At the inception of the euro, it was thought possible to have a centralised monetary authority and decentralised bank supervision, but the inability to separate sovereign-debt problems from those of bank stability has led the leaders of the member states of the EU to agree to centralise supervision in the Single Supervisory Mechanism.

Bennett Model helped pioneer the exporting of garments from China in 1975, the year before Mao Zedong died,

Western executives are checking on potential new suppliers in southern Vietnam, central Cambodia and the hinterlands of Java in Indonesia.

relatively small size,

Just ten years ago, the natural-gas industry was so sure that domestic production was reaching its limit that it made large investments in terminals to import liquefied natural gas (LNG). Yet fracking has increased supply so rapidly that these facilities are now being converted to export LNG.

It’s true that the U.S. economy has grown faster than that of Europe for the past generation. Since 1980 — when our politics took a sharp turn to the right, while Europe’s didn’t — America’s real G.D.P. has grown, on average, 3 percent per year. Meanwhile, the E.U. 15 — the bloc of 15 countries that were members of the European Union before it was enlarged to include a number of former Communist nations — has grown only 2.2 percent a year. America rules!

Or maybe not. All this really says is that we’ve had faster population growth. Since 1980, per capita real G.D.P. — which is what matters for living standards — has risen at about the same rate in America and in the E.U. 15: 1.95 percent a year here; 1.83 percent there.

Broadband, in particular, is just about as widespread in Europe as it is in the United States, and it’s much faster and cheaper.

But the debate about austerity and the cost of high public-debt levels misses a key point: Public debt owed to foreigners is different from debt owed to residents.

If foreign debt matters more than public debt, the key variable requiring adjustment is the external deficit, not the fiscal deficit. A country that has a balanced current account does not need any additional foreign capital. That is why risk premiums are continuing to fall in the eurozone, despite high political uncertainty in Italy and continuing large fiscal deficits elsewhere. The peripheral countries’ external deficits are falling rapidly, thus diminishing the need for foreign financing.

And the evidence confirms that the euro crisis is not really about sovereign debt, but about foreign debt.

the monthly base salary of the most senior bloc officials is 18,370 euros, or $24,830.

European Union officials generally pay low taxes,

The bad news is that it has become increasingly clear that, at least for large countries, currency areas will be highly unstable unless they follow national borders.

The recently created European Banking Authority has only limited powers over national supervisors, whose daily work is guided mainly by national considerations.

Moreover, the ECB already bears de facto responsibility for the stability of the eurozone’s banking system. But, until now, it had to lend massive amounts to banks without being able to judge their soundness, because all of that information was in the hands of national authorities who guarded it jealously and typically denied problems until it was too late.

Consider the case of a bank headquartered in Italy, but with an important subsidiary in Germany. The German operations naturally generate a surplus of funds (given that savings in Germany far exceed investment on average). The parent bank would like to use these funds to reinforce the group’s liquidity. But the German supervisory authorities consider Italy at risk and thus oppose any transfer of funds there.CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThe supervisor of the home country (Italy) has the opposite interest. It would like to see the “internal capital market” operate as much as possible. Here, too, it makes sense to have the ECB in charge as a neutral arbiter with respect to these opposing interests.

You should look at it more holistically. We wouldn't have been able to increase our exports if the other countries had behaved like us and had not increased their demand for an entire decade.

Excluding Greece from the union would be the completely wrong approach. Greece's problem is its inefficiency in terms of public finances. That can be corrected.

Starbatty: In my experience, speculators are only successful when political promises diverge from economic reality, as has become clear in Greece.